Experience, Immersion and Perception: Communication Design for Urban and Natural Environments

This paper highlights the role of Communication Design as an agent for the promotion of territory. Our research arises from the need to communicate the place identity by sharing different typology of documents, which together represent a heritage of memories, both tangible and intangible. The analysis of cultural tourism industry reveals that travellers are in search of experiences that involve several aspects of a place. In other words, they're interested in discovering landscape - as it is defined by the Council of Europe - its meaning and aesthetic identity. In this scenario the cultural promotion of territory should become more “experiential” and our research tries to propose some guidelines in this direction. On the one hand, we discuss the role of perception and immersive representation as means to gain experience. On the other, we present the potentialities offered by devices that act as mediator between human and ambient. We will present some case studies to highlight how a combination of different multimedia contents and a high interaction level allows us both to make accessible several kind of information and to catch the user attention through immersive visual experiences. We argue that Communication Design has to develop new communication modalities, not only for tourism purposes but also to support inhabitants in understanding their own cultural identity.